Month: February 2018

Alinsky tactics. Their entire philosophy is to provoke a reaction so they can use it against you and regulate you even more. 1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.“ Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and …

This post, I want us to go deeper into Character Creation. A lot deeper. I’d like to talk about how you develop each character’s voice. Voice is one of those things that are hard to define but easy to see. There’s a big difference between Scarlett O’Hara’s voice and the godfather’s. Just listen to them talk …

Plot’s good, but it’s not the whole story. The reason the plot matters is because it matters to the characters. Readers read because of the characters. If you replaced your characters with unfeeling robots, your readers probably wouldn’t care about your story. So how do you design your characters? I recommend starting small. Here are six questions …

Last post we talked about the first layer of plot for your novel—your one-sentence summary. The purpose of a one-sentence summary is to break the ice. To separate people who are in your target audience from people who aren’t. To give your target audience an opportunity to say, “Tell me more!” So let’s say you’re at a …

Plot is a complex beast. A novel has at least six layers of plot. This month, we’ll look at the outermost layer—the one-sentence summary. Why write a one-sentence summary? Because your one-sentence summary is a powerful sales tool. If you’re traditionally published, you need to sell your story seven times: You have to sell it to your …

When the coliseum was built in 80 A.D. it was one of the most incredible architectural achievements in human history. 1,938 years later, time has taken its toll—its most recent major restoration was at a cost of nearly $30 million and took several years. When the famous Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue was first assembled out of bronze, …

There’s a bit of magic that happens to all writers at one time or another. You sit down to start writing and the words aren’t coming. You keep at it for a bit, and the words still aren’t coming. You press on and on, and the words still aren’t coming. And at some point, the words start coming. The …

What we see in the writings of the Stoics is that they strove to ensure that their ambition never corrupted their self-awareness. We rarely see ego and self-glorification in their pages, in fact, we usually find the opposite: meditations on how to improve, reminders that they were still human and flawed. This lack of ego was also …

If you hate New Year’s resolutions, you may be a little gun-shy about trying to make any changes to your life in January. Just on principle. I don’t love New Year’s resolutions, since they rarely live to see February, and therefore seem a bit useless to me. But I do like to spend some time around the end …